The growth of electronic commerce has been fueled particularly by the popularity and convenience of online store websites. The number of enterprises selling products and services online has grown, and there has been a corresponding increase in the variety of products sold online and the diversity of online customers and online merchants. A merchant planning an online store website will typically seek to create a particular experience for the online shopper that supports the commercial goals, merchandising efforts, and branding strategies of the merchant.
Many online merchants lack the institutional expertise and internal technological resources to design and operate every aspect of an online store themselves. It is thus common for merchants to contract with an independent party for such services. In some cases this may conflict with the goal of having a store design and a shopping experience that are tailored to the commercial needs and conditions of a particular merchant. For example, some independent providers of online store design or hosting services may provide merchants with a “one size fits all” template for the pages of an online store that present items for browsing and selection for purchase.
Even where merchants are given some ability to customize the shopper experience for online store sites, however, security considerations have generally prevented independent operators of online store site services from enabling merchant customization of the shopping cart itself and of the checkout experience. Checkout processing pages are typically provided over a secure or authenticated connection, and concerns about the integrity of the payment process in online transactions have typically allowed trivial branding of these pages at best. Because typically merchant customization is limited to the pre-purchase portion of the online shopping experience, an online shopper generally experiences discontinuity when the checkout process is initiated. For example, the shopper may experience the launching of checkout as a removal from the store in which the shopper had been browsing. The checkout phase of the online shopping experience has thus tended to be uniform across different merchants and product lines, and merchants have been impeded from using the checkout experience to further their commercial goals and maximize their sales.